Victor G. Kiernan: Early Translator of Iqbal and Faiz
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
Chicago , IL
Victor Gordon Kiernan, 95, perhaps the first translator of Iqbal and Faiz, died in Stow, Scotland, on 17 February 2009.
Kiernan was a professor emeritus, and held a chair in Modern History in Edinburgh University till his retirement in 1977. He was part of a generation of distinguished UK Marxist historians that includes Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rude and E.P. Thompson. He joined the Communist Party in 1934 but left it 25 years later (1959) after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, saying, "I waited in hopes the [Communist] party might improve. It didn't."
He came to India in 1938 on study under Trinity College scholarship. He lived in undivided India (1938–1946), taught at colleges in Lahore (including Aitchison College) got to personally know many progressive writers and communist activists in the country, in addition to his friends from Cambridge then back in India. In 1938, he married Shanta Gandhi, a dancer and theatrical activist but divorced her in Bombay, 1946, before returning to UK (It seems he had gotten to know in London). Not too many of his dear friends knew about this marriage, but nearly 4 decades later (seven years after his retirement) he married Heather Massey in 1984, who survives him.
The obituaries in The Independent and The Guardian recall his political activism and interest in English and Urdu poetry during, among other things in his long productive life: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/victor-kiernan-marxist-historian-writer-and-linguist-who-challenged-the-tenets-of-imperialism-1627101.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/18/victor-kiernan-obituary . Eric Hobsbawm has also written one: http://www.organizedrage.com/2009/02/obituary-victor-kiernan-historian-with.html.
He was a long time friend of India, and highly regarded still by the Indian Communist party. In 2003, a collection of his essays was published as a tribute honoring his 90 th birthday: ‘Across Time and Continents: A Tribute to Victor G. Kiernan,’ edited by Prakash Karat.
He was very interested in progressive Urdu poets, particularly Faiz, and knew Alys George, a fellow socialist-communist from London, who married Faiz in 1941 in Kashmir, with Sheikh Abdullah supervising. He learned Urdu, spoke it and became so passionate about the language and the poetry that he later translated Iqbal and Faiz: (a) ‘Poems From Iqbal: Renderings In English Verse with Comparative Urdu Text by Muhammad Iqbal’ (Reprinted 2005: ISBN 13: 9780195799743; ISBN 10: 0195799747) and, (b) ‘Poems by Faiz’ (ISBN: 0-19-565198-7), dedicated to Begum Alys Faiz.
In my own book (‘ In English, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’: ISBN : 978- 1- 4363-7313-5 and 978- 4363-7312-8; http://www2.xlibris.com/books/webimages/wd/51828/ ), illustrating the problems of translation between two languages, so philologically apart, I have compared Kiernan’s translation of a Faiz poem with published translations by others, along with his extended comments on Faiz (December 1962). Familiar with the language and the poetry and philosophy, his views on Iqbal and Faiz deserve consideration, coming as they do from an understanding Western eye. There is no record of him meeting Iqbal who died the same year (1938) that Kiernan arrived in undivided India. However, given his own socialist-communist views, he has, understandably, a softer spot for Faiz and his wife -- he was not only friends with Faiz, worked and consulted with him over his translation published in 1971, but had known a political fellow-traveler, Alys, from London . A few of his comments here from his long introduction to his book, ‘Poems by Faiz’:
1. “Religious enthusiasm led Iqbal regrettably far towards seeing everything as an antithesis between Eastern faith and Western reason, identified with Western materialism and imperialism. … It was an antithesis that reflected the historical contradiction of his whole position; the inspiration of Faiz’s life has been the hope of overcoming it with the aid of a new synthesis, that of socialism, seen as the reconciler of old culture and modern science in a refashioned society. …. [Faiz] has had all his life the same fundamental sense that poetry ought to be the servant of the cause, a beacon to ‘poor humanity’s afflicted will’, not a mere display of ornamental skill.”
2. “. … Iqbal – whose public recitations were confined as a rule to religious or political gatherings – [assumed] at times the figure of the spiritual leader seated among his disciples: Faiz haunted, in spite of republicanism, by whispers of long crumbled palace halls. Iqbal was fond of the standard image of moth and candle, though his moth might now be a laboring class foolishly bowing before the idols of the rich. Faiz has been loyal to that of garden and rosebed, a rosebed now as likely as not to typify the masses, the poor, buffeted by the rude winds of tyranny.”
3. “Iqbal moved towards a Love that was a disembodied force, that meant also idealism, or enthusiasm, or e`lan vital. Faiz began with the stereotype of cruel beauty, but a stable marriage, and domestic life of more modern patter that Iqbal’s, carried him towards an image more human and companionable, though still only elusively suggested by comparison with Western love-poetry…. It has been noted that Faiz has far more than Iqbal of a sort of ‘masochism’ habitual in Urdu poetry which seeks the pang of love rather than its fulfillment. Iqbal’s pan-Islamic thinking brought to his mind memories of the Muslim as world-conqueror; Faiz was concerned with the Muslim of his own time times, as an underdog, and in some manner was able to fuse sympathy for hard-pressed laborer or peasant with the traditional grief of the lover… in Faiz’s prison poems especially, separation from a woman and from a movement, or homeland, merge into one another.
4. “Iqbal and Faiz both looked abroad for ideas as well as at home. ….Iqbal was only going to one more source when he brought Nietzsche into the Panjab, and Faiz when he helped to introduce Marx. Iqbal wrote of the tribulations of the poor majestically, as if looking down on them from heaven; he preached revolt of downtrodden peoples…. infused with Islamic fraternalism. Faiz belonged to a generation that examined poverty at close range…in social, economic detail. Still, Iqbal too had known of Marx, and paid tribute to him in more than one poem, and Faiz on his side has written verses religious in complexion … Iqbal was an Islamic thinker with a strong dash of what has been coming to be known as ‘ Islamic socialism’; Faiz might be called a socialist with a groundwork of Muslim culture and feeling. He is indeed one of those many ‘cultural Muslims’ in many lands today who think of themselves not as religious in a specific sense but as heirs to a long experiment in civilization, and to a great extent which also did homage to truth and justice and to the upright man prepared to uphold them at all hazards….”
5. “Iqbal and Faiz both belong very deeply to the Panjab, and when Faiz goes abroad it does not take long for him to begin to wish himself back in his own country. But both needed a world-vision to sustain them…. Iqbal after his early travels shut himself up most of the time in a small room whence his thoughts could range abroad unchecked… Faiz has had for a second or spiritual home the socialist lands, the socialist world movement, the peace movement. Disappointments with progress abroad as well as at home were bound to befall both…. [Iqbal] is alone in a universe that contains a God, though a distant and silent one; Faiz’s [sic] knows only human beings, and they too are distant and silent. Iqbal … pictures himself as a traveler voyaging across immensities of space; Faiz is shut up in a deserted banqueting-hall, and its nights.”
[Victor Gordon Kiernan: 1913-2009]
